The application I first started working on after switching jobs to Mobiata has been released! FlightTrack for Android is now available on any Android-powered device. Yay.

I'm pretty shocked at the development pace for mobile devices. It is light speed in comparison to my Oracle work. In the 2+ years I worked at Oracle, we didn't have a single major release due to constant delays (the running joke being "we're releasing 6-9 months the current date"). In comparison, I've been working at Mobiata for five weeks and we've already released two apps (mine, as well as TripDeck for iPhone).

I'm enjoying working at home. It affords many great benefits: I can listen to music on speakers, I can easily do those errands that can only be done during work hours, I can get packages delivered to my apartment. And yes, I work in my underwear sometimes. By far the strangest benefit is weight loss; I've lost about one pound each week I've worked at Mobiata. That may not seem like much, but I've been trying for years to drop a few pounds (back to my college-era weight), and in the span of five weeks I'm most of the way there. I'm going to need to buy a new belt because my current one looks like a wreck, it's been worn on so many notches that it is all wrinkly.

I am still at a loss to explain the weight change exactly, because I'm not eating any healthier (nor exercising any more than before). I think it has to do with a different eating schedule. When I worked at Oracle, I would wake up and eat breakfast around 8:30, and my coworkers and I would get lunch at 11:00. That meant I'd overeat for a bit in the morning, and then I'd be starving by the time I got home around 18:00, so I'd have eat extra then, too. Now I just eat little meals and snacks when I feel peckish.

Anyways, things are going pretty well at camp Daniel.

Inspired by epistasis post and my intense desire to put off work for a bit, here's my recent gamelog. Also, a picture of my smashed-up car.

( Games and Car )

I don't know how anyone can do that to a parked car either.

Well, someone fucked up the passenger side doors of my car real good tonight while it was parked outside a restaurant. I was lucky enough that this person left a note... I am going through the insurance claim processes now. Still, I was not looking forward to my first "my car looks like crap because shit happened to it" moment - I happen to like how beautiful my car is. Was. Will be.

I wasn't around when it happened and thus have no idea how someone can hit a parked car that hard. It's not like the doors have a small dent, the warp goes all the way up the side. Plus, there is a dent on each door - how did this happen? I'd put up pictures but it's too dark to take any good ones; if anyone is interested I can post some tomorrow.

I sure am bad at updating this Livejournal thing, but important stuff has come up.

I am leaving my job at Oracle. Tomorrow. I put in my two weeks... 9 business days ago. I am going to work with Ben at Mobiata making smartphone apps.

It is exciting and nervewracking at the same time. Leaving Oracle is kind of sad, because I like the people I work with a lot. Not as much the things I've been working on, though. I have learned a ton in the last two years though, I scoff at the work I did in college now as being that of a much lesser coder.

Anyways, just thought I'd put that out there.

Last night The Beatles: Rock Band came out. I crushed it with great celerity.

A friend recommended I try singing and playing guitar at the same time, for that true Beatles feel. After duct-taping a microphone to a tripod as a ghetto microphone stand, I found this to be an excellent idea and played through most of the game in this manner.

I've not had this much fun with a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game in a long time... it used to be for me that the harder the song was, the more fun it was. But it's now I just enjoy the music, and since The Beatles are one of my favorite bands, the experience was wholly enjoyable. Now, I just need to find other people to play with... (possibly Saturday night? Trying to coordinate things, but I suck at that.)

Tags: games

My general distaste with chain letters has made me avoid jumping on the Facebook healthcare bandwagon, though I suppose it would be cool now that Barack Obama himself has joined in. But I enjoy the sentiment greatly.

Only one person has responded negatively to these so far, his argument being that we should fix our old roads and bridges before healthcare, because people have died when bridges collapsed (like 35W a few years ago). This - this is what we're up against.

Musetta and I went to the Minnesota state fair today. We had a lot of fun walking around and eating horrifically dangerous food, but the most amusing things happened when we played a few carnival games.

Given that I won Musetta some stuffed animals last year, the pressure was on for me to unnecessarily one-up myself. We weren't having any luck for a while, until we passed by the "beat the guesser" game. You could either have him try to guess your weight (within 3 pounds), age (within 2 years) or birth month (within 2 months). I've done this once before, many years ago, and got creamed by the guesser (who got my weight almost perfectly) but I decided to put my money in for the guesser to guess my age. I look pretty young for 24, and I was curious what he would say. His answer...

Fifteen.

I got a stuffed dog.

I then proceeded to demolish a Skee ball machine and won a gigantic Pikachu, and Musetta won a whack-a-mole tournament which netted her a monkey. All in all, I think we came out on top!

While I was visiting California two months ago, my parents took Musetta and I whitewater rafting. My parents, former raft guides, have taken me on many fun trips so I always try to get them to go on another whenever I happen to be in California. We took a trip down the Gorge on a good day, got a few good waves to ride on and whatnot.

"River booty" is the term for items found floating around, and I managed to snag some midway through our trip. I spotted a hat in the water and we grabbed it. It was a black Astros hat and inside the rim were two names - one an indecipherable signature (aren't they all), the second a printed name that looked like an identifier of sorts.

I took the hat with me back home, thinking that (given the power of the Internet) I might be able to find the owner of this hat. The name inside wasn't a common one, so my first instinct was to jump on Facebook and search for the name. I managed to turn up 14 potential candidates, and from there I was able to throw out a few results because I assumed that only someone from Texas would wear an Astros hat. I messaged them telling them that I'd found a hat.

Within a few hours I actually got a positive response, with details on where he lost of the hat that corroborated with the location where I found it. Amazingly enough, I'd managed to track down the Texan who had lost his hat in California. I eventually got around to sending him his hat back, and today I got a thank-you gift in response: a Texas Longhorns hat. I'm not really a big hat person but I appreciate the sentiment.

Anyways, just goes to show the amazing things you can do with the internet these days. Ten years ago, that hat would've been ditched, a hopelessly lost item. I'm beginning to think that people would be better off writing e-mail addresses on their stuff instead of names nowadays.

This will only be of interest to Carls I went to college with, but: I just had the idea of looking up Carl Nelson to see if he's put any of his stuff online, and he's got a website now with the recent contents of his sketchbook... Just a head's up for those who might wonder what he's been up to (like me).

(Man, he's come a long way since Carltoons Freshman year.)

I've completely given up ever arguing again on the internet. I'm not sure why I got suckered into doing it for so long (I suppose the whole "but that person is so obviously wrong" thing) but no longer. I'm not going to deal with people who say homosexuality is a disease; people who don't understand how tax laws work; people who blame every public policy problem on a particular political party; or similar issues.

Basically, I've come to two conclusions:

1. One gains nothing but a smidgen of self-satisfaction during arguments, because no one on the internet ever backs down. At best you find others who will back up your side of the cause, which just causes an escalation of the issue.

2. If I don't make the argument, 99% of the time someone else will do it for me.

Things are different in person (or at least, live conversation), but I'm not sure exactly why. Just something to do with the medium of communication.